


Guide to Getting Lost

by Theatricuddles



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Camping, F/F, Picnics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 15:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20311948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theatricuddles/pseuds/Theatricuddles
Summary: Aubrey was just trying to have a nice time with her girlfriend.





	Guide to Getting Lost

Aubrey was making an actual plan for once, so you absolutely knew she was being serious.

That didn’t mean Duck sounded all that pleased when she called him at 11:30 at night, saying “So Duck, hypothetically, if someone wanted to take their partner out for a picnic-“

“They should hypothetically do that when it’s not the literal middle of the night, Aubrey,” Duck said.

“Technically it’s half an hour before midnight! But seriously Duck,” Aubrey said, “can you call me back tomorrow? I’m sorry I called so late, but I was worried I might forget it-”

“Say no more, say no more,” said Duck. “I get it, Aubrey, believe me. But can I call you back tomorrow? We’re doing Chosen Brunch with Indrid, and it’s like. you know how you feel when you bring your boyfriend back and all your cousins start making fun of him?”

“…Did that happen when you brought Indrid home?” Aubrey asked.

“Haven’t done that yet, but this is basically the same thing, so… I’d like that not to happen, and it’s probably more likely to happen if I show up sleep-deprived,” Duck said.

Aubrey tapped her fingers against the wall. “I know I’m guilty of this too, Duck, but… y’know that things won’t always turn out the way you worry they will, right?”

“ ‘Noted, Aubrey.” Duck yawned. “Pick this up around noon?”

“Sure!!” Aubrey said. Besides, this gave her more time to try and plan out what she wanted to make for the picnic. Only problem was, she hadn’t really been cooking for herself for a while. But she probably would be fine, and besides, Dani deserved better than microwavable veggie nuggets.

And on an unrelated note, why didn’t they have dinosaur-shaped veggie nuggets? There had to be a market for white moms giving the “healthier” option to their kids. And didn’t she, a vegetarian, deserve to have her food be dinosaur-shaped on occasion?

They probably sold dinosaur cookie cutters somewhere around. If she could figure out how to make veggie nuggets, she could very easily make some herself. Veggie nuggets had to be easier than the normal meat chicken nuggets. After all, it wasn’t like you had to process the meat yourself. They’d probably be made out of seitan or something.

And then it was 1:30 in the morning and Aubrey took a break from reading veggie chicken nugget recipes and recoiling from the nearly textual whiteness of the food bloggers to realize still hadn’t showered, so she went to go do that and halfway back to her room, whispered “_shit_” as she realized she hadn’t. actually… picked food to make for Dani.

Clearly the internet wasn’t helping. Okay, what did her parents usually bring on picnics when she was younger? She remembered a bucket of fried chicken at one point. That wouldn’t work now, obviously. Neither she nor Dani ate chicken… but there were vegetarian versions. There was hope.

Okay, entree settled. What else did people eat on picnics? Probably about the same things people brought to a barbecue. Potato salad, corn on the cob… corn on the cob was probably not too easy to pack in a picnic basket, but if she cut the corn off the cob and put it in a little Tupperware container, it might be easier. But was it worth it to bring a ton of barbecue food to a little secluded wooded alcove? Maybe she’d just have to have a barbecue date with Dani on another time. There was no way that Ned, Duck, and the other residents of Amnesty Lodge weren’t going to crash it immediately, but she wouldn’t have a barbecue date any other way to be perfectly honest.

But that still didn’t answer the question of what exactly she was supposed to pack for Dani. So at 2:30 AM she finally decided on the classics: grilled cheese, a thermos of tomato soup, and chocolate chip cookies.

At ten AM, she woke up and her fingers were halfway to dialing Duck’s number before remembering he was at chosen brunch probably, and immediately went back to scrolling through food blogs to find recipes for homemade tomato soup. She picked three that looked promising and started the process of making one later around one o’clock when Duck finally called her back and told her various places he’d taken people when he was younger.

Aubrey tried the three different recipes for tomato soup through the next week, before finally deciding that they all tasted pretty good and choosing the first one she’d happened to click on. As a result, she didn’t have time to make any kind of chocolate chip cookie research beyond the lid of the oatmeal canister, but that was a project for another time.

“You’re excited,” Dani said, as Aubrey came practically bounding up to her.

“We’re going on a picnic!” Aubrey said, holding out the picnic basket.

Dani just smiled in response, a tiny flash of her fangs, and Aubrey was pretty proof-positive this was what happiness felt like.

Of course, they then proceeded into the forest and everything immediately fell apart.

Her first warning sign should’ve been that Duck had given her a hand-drawn map, rather than a trail map. He’d walked the path where they were supposed to go with her, too, but she hadn’t exactly been walking these trails for the past twenty years.

They’d ended up just following the trail they were on for a while.

Which was fine, for the time being. For not being the nature-y one of the relationship, Aubrey kept noticing cool things, like a little patch of soft moss on the side of a tree, or a dew-covered spiderweb. Of course, that meant she wasn’t paying a very large amount of attention to the map.

As they came to the third tree that looked suspiciously similar to the one they’d passed a while ago, Aubrey finally admitted, “I don’t know where we’re going.”

The two of them walked in silence for a minute. Aubrey noticed that a little fern was starting to crumple in on itself, and took a second to pluck off a dead leaf, and silently hoped it might get better.

Then Dani realized, “I think I might know the place you were thinking of,” and found the place in the next twenty minutes while Aubrey had been leading them in circles for the better part of an hour.

Aubrey, even though she could feel herself starting to sweat through her t-shirt, resolved to try not to be a jerk and just sit down and enjoy the picnic with Dani.

And then it started raining.

“Are you kidding me,” was the first thing out of Aubrey’s mouth as the few raindrops she felt fall on her head quickly turned to a torrential downpour.

“Sorry, Aubrey,” Dani said, smiling to her apologetically. “But at least we found it for next time,” she said, holding out her flannel in an attempt to shelter Aubrey from the rain.

Aubrey sighed. Her soggy hair was beginning to hang in her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just… I wanted to enjoy a nice nature walk with you and be a cool girlfriend, and all I managed to do was fuck it up. Again,” she said. She wrapped an arm protectively over the picnic basket in the vain hope that maybe the sandwiches wouldn’t get soggy.

“Well,” Dani said, “one of the best ways to grow moss is in the rain. So we might still have a nature opportunity after all.”

As they wandered back down the path to duck under a little alcove they’d found between two big rocks, Aubrey sighed. “I know you’re not upset with me, and I appreciate it,” she said quietly. “And I’m not asking you to be upset with me, like… by any stretch of the imagination, but… I just wanted to do something nice for you. I just feel like you’re the one who plans most of our outings, you’re the one who asked me out, and… you’re so put together and I’m not,” Aubrey finished. “I wanted to be the responsible one for once, and all I gave you was a long, sweaty walk and soggy sandwiches, and-“

Aubrey looked away, not wanting to meet Dani’s eyes. As she looked out at the woods they’d just been wandering through, Aubrey noticed the fern they’d passed earlier was spreading out its leaves a little.

“That fern’s starting to perk up,” Aubrey said. She’d forgotten what point she’d been trying to make. The “almost about to cry” she’d been feeling ever since it started raining was no longer an “almost”.

She felt Dani’s hands on either side of her face.

“Aubrey, you know why I love you, right?” Dani asked.

Aubrey wanted to say something, but staring into Dani’s eyes, dark brown with flecks of gold, whatever thoughts she’d formed were quickly forgotten.

“I’m not sure you do,” Dani said, rubbing her thumb over Aubrey’s lips. “I love you, Aubrey, _because_ you care so much. I love you because you notice little things, and because you want to do so much at every moment, and I’m not going to pretend it’s hard to follow you sometimes, because frankly, it is. It feels like I’m running after a force of nature. But I love how you care so much about everything, and I don’t think that’s all part of your ADHD. But I know that’s what you’re scared about, right now. And I love you,” she said, pressing a kiss to Aubrey’s lips, “so much,” another kiss, “and I think that part of you is beautiful.”

Well, if Aubrey was having trouble forming words before, it was even harder with her brain short-circuited. Awfully rude of Dani, that, if she was being perfectly honest.

So Aubrey just responded by kissing Dani back, and feeling the sensation of Dani’s old flannel under her hands, even if both of them were drenched at this point, and god, she didn’t know why Dani thought Aubrey was somehow good enough for her but she was never going to stop trying to be everything Dani thought she was.

After a moment, Aubrey broke the kiss because she’d remembered to ask what kind of fern that was, to which Dani responded that she wasn’t certain but she’d look it up when she got home, and almost kissed Aubrey again before Aubrey thudded her ankle on the picnic basket and remembered it all of a sudden.

“We should probably at least eat the soup before it gets cold,” she said, and Dani pressed one last kiss to her cheekbone before nodding.

So then Aubrey opened the thermos (thankfully the soup was still warm), and poured the soup out into the cup, and smiled at Dani’s look of surprise at the steam coming off of it.

“It’s really warm,” she said, taking a sip and promptly sticking her (presumably burnt) tongue out.

“Now who’s the impatient one?” Aubrey said, tucking a strand of hair behind Dani’s ear. “Doesn’t Mama have a thermos?”

Dani looked lost in thought for a moment. “If I’m being honest, I assumed that was just another Earth thing where people act like something is warm and it really isn’t. Like radiators,” she mentioned.

“…Dani, radiators are warm. They literally produce heat,” Aubrey said.

“What? Nobody ever told me these things!” Dani said. “It doesn’t exactly come up when most of our appliances are powered by magic!”

Aubrey laughed as she started explaining how a thermos cup worked, at least from what she remembered her dad telling her when she was about fourteen and asked him. She paid attention to Dani’s smile the whole time she spoke.

As they talked, Aubrey got out the Tupperware she’d kept the sandwiches in. “I can’t believe I had a mental breakdown over soggy sandwiches for nothing,” she mentioned in between explaining thermoses. The two of them ate the sandwiches down to the crusts, then dipped the crusts in the now-cooling tomato soup.

Dani talked a little more about fire magic, how there were specific people to enchant things like ovens and most people only knew enough magic to just turn the oven on, and sometimes not even that. As Dani continued, they passed the remainder of the thermos between them. Aubrey knew it shouldn’t send sparks down her fingertips every time she remembered that drinking from the same cup as Dani was basically a kiss, given that she’d just been making out with Dani not an hour prior, but she just couldn’t help it.

As she picked up the basket and prepared to get up and head home, she noticed Dani was looking up. “The sun’s almost setting,” she said. “The stars will be out soon.”

“That’s true,” Aubrey said, taking Dani’s hand and squeezing it.

“We have a blanket,” Dani said, “and I don’t think it’s supposed to rain anymore. We could sleep out under the stars.

“What, no sleeping bags? No carefully planned snacks?” Aubrey asked.

Dani smiled back at Aubrey. “Well, someone inspired me to be more spontaneous,” she said.

Aubrey kissed her again. “You definitely still owe me trail mix, though,” she said.

Dani walked back over, and the two of them spread the blanket out and laid down on it, looking up at the sky and watching it fade from blue into black. Eventually, the stars began to come out and Dani rolled over to rest her head on Aubrey’s tummy. Aubrey ran her fingers through Dani’s hair and sighed. One of the rare few times she didn’t feel insecure about the width of her waist was when people were using her as a pillow.

“Do you have constellations in Sylvain?” Aubrey asked Dani, as her fingers caught a snarl in Dani’s hair.

“We have some, yeah,” Dani said. “Most of them were based on creation myths, like the twins who fell into the heart of the quell, or the one about the wolf-woman.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard those before,” Aubrey said, and for the next hour or so, Dani told Aubrey about stories she’d heard growing up. In return, Aubrey told her as many Greek myths as she could remember, which wasn’t a huge amount, but it didn’t really matter, because a little while later, Dani was asleep.

As Aubrey folded the blanket over her and her girlfriend, she resolved that they would have to take a camping trip at some point.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a short, fluffy piece, but then I (and by extension, Aubrey) had to get sad about my ADHD.
> 
> I love these two so so much.


End file.
